Not a pregnancy scare just a question

[Krose99]

I know that Tik Tok isn’t a reliable source for sex education, but I constantly see people talking about being pregnant and not knowing it for the whole 9 months, is that common? Or rare? This sounds dumb but I’d rather rely on you guys than Tik Tok to get facts.

[Heather]

I've talked about this before, but didn't have any luck finding one of the threads, so I'll just go ahead and do a little repeat performance.

That is exceptionally rare. Not only it it rare, it really only tends to happen in a couple limited and very specific circumstances, like, when someone is:
• so traumatized -- like from ongoing abuse or a violent assault -- that they simply are no longer paying attention to their body at all.
• very out of touch with reality, like because of serious and ongoing substance abuse/addiction, or severe and untreated mental illness.
• deeply uneducated about their body and pregnancy, to the point they do not know things like that no longer menstruating (when it's not about menopause), having had intercourse, being very tired, and showing are about a pregnancy.
• simply being dishonest, something that happens more often than any of these other scenarios, and is particularly common in situations where, for the pregnant person, it doesn't feel safe in some way to be honest about having had sex (or with whom) or having been assaulted, going without contraception, or something else. Sometimes that isn't about safety so much as someone just not wanting to take responsibility.

And that's about it.

[confusedinlove]

What about cases where a woman gets pregnant late in life and assumes she is going through menopause? Wasn't there a reality show called "I didn't know I was pregnant", and most of the episodes were like that? Not that a reality show is a great source for facts about... anything, but it seems plausible to me.

[Heather]

Being in perimenopause (someone who has reached menopause cannot become pregnant) doesn’t stop you from having all the symptoms of pregnancy, very much including that many months into it, you will look pregnant. In fact, since you often already feel like such crap, you are highly attuned to any new crap feelings. And how perimenopause feels is very different from how pregnancy feels. I can not only tell you that from personal experience, perimenopause is also the subject of my latest book, so I’ve been buried in research on it for the last year and change.

On top of that, by the time you start perimenopause you have usually long learned what to expect with a pregnancy. Not knowing you are for the whole of it just because you’re in peri strikes me as preposterous (as was that awful, fear-factoring show).

For sure, because some folks jump the gun once they get to late pero and start missing periods and go without contraception, being surprised by a pregnancy certainly does happen with some regularity for folks in peri.
I can also see someone who doesn’t know what to expect with peri, which is common, *at first* mistaking a pregnancy for menopause. That certainly happens, too.

But getting all the way, or anywhere near, delivery? Unless the kind of stuff I mentioned in my last post is afoot, that’s just not at all likely.